Posts by hammarbtyp

Uncle Sam probes cyberattack on Pennsylvania water system by suspected Iranian crew

Pay peanuts...

I am a bit surprised. The US has very stringent Cyber security standards for critical infrastructure via the NIST framework.

However this sort of things shows the issues of implementation especially with the high fragmentation of the market with independent water companies per state

It is a stretch to expect each small company to have the correct level of expertise to maintain cyber standards. Although I work in the PLC industry, I had never heard of the model indicated

My guess was the job was done at lowest cost fixed price and corners were cut. In cyber security you definitely get what you pay for

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Brain the size of a planet, and all you ask me is to generate more cat pictures. Call that job satisfaction, 'cause I don't.

You think you've got problems? What are you supposed to do if you are a manically depressed AI? No, don't try to answer that. I'm fifty thousand times more intelligent than you and even I don't know the answer. It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level

Life, don't talk to me about life

Pfzzzzz...

Re: I predict that AI will calculate the next Mersenne Prime...

AI discovers the last Mersenne Prime...

it also finds a pattern hidden in PI, written in base 11, indicating that all reality is just beta of the next version of Duke Nukem, so solving the mystery why it was never released

Elon Musk finds a new funding stream for the site formerly known as twitter

With the latest tranche of launches, the starlink satellite now forms 97% of the night sky. For a fee, groups like star gazers, or beach goers can now pay for the satellites orbits to be shifted to allow a few hours of uninterrupted sky access.

Alternatively a fee can be paid to allow the adverts generated via the high powered lasers on each satellite to be turned off as it transits a region

Antarctica, the last remaining place on earth with out 24 hour starlink coverage becomes the most popular holiday location

The 2023 US Elections is won by ChatGPT-10 when it wipes the floor with the other candidates during presidential debate

Later it turns out that Trump was actually run by a AI Beta version developed by Elon Musk. Its model was based on Elon's physical mind download, combined with a secretly recovered Nazi wartime program to prolong the life of Germany's wartime leader.

It was further revealed that other countries had also been experimenting with replacing leaders with AI, with the UK revealing their homegrown A.I program. Unfortunately the Johnson and Truss models proved to be deficient, if not downright dangerous and the UK was only saved by hitting the emergency shutdown (hidden in Larry the cat). The latest model, Rishi 1.0 was deficient in that it could not pass the Turing test

the new ChatGPT president proved how prescient Elon Musk was, by introducing an new era of peace and ensuring that no one would ever again need to work by converting all humans into the equivalent of 24V batteries to power the new AI data centers.

While irritating, it was agreed that that it was a better outcome that another 5 years of a Trump administration

Inside Denmark’s hell week as critical infrastructure orgs faced cyberattacks

The 1990's are calling and want there comment back.

There are many good reasons for a powerplant to be on the internet. For example you may want to combine power predictions with weather data

The issue is not that it is connected to the internet, it is how it is connected and how the control system is isolated from say the enterprise system. For example you may want to connect a data diode to ensure data is only going outwards.

The problem tends not to be the internet, but the fact that organizations get lazy. The original Sandworm attack on Ukraine infrastructure was due to someone decided to bypass the firewall with a dedicated link (I'm guessing because all the security stuff was getting in the way of their day job)

Musk thinks X marks the spot for Grok AI engine based on social network

1st against the wall when the revolution comes

modeled after the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Surely Marvin would be a better name and rename twitter Sirius cybernetics

Based on the majority of Twixxer's input nowadays, i will be impressed if any AI model won't become manically depressive and paranoid in about a week

World leaders ink AI safety pacts while Musk and Sunak engage in awkward bromance

Remember the 70's promise's

When I was growing up, we were promised that robotics would free us from drudgery, and by the time I became an adult, we would all live a life of leisure while our robotics slaves did the work for us.

The reality was that it increased the gap between the have and have nots, forcing people into jobs that were not worth investing in Robotics, while the profits went to an increasingly small mega billionaires, who used there cash to wield soft power to protect their status

I have no confidence, AI is not going down the same route

Lenovo’s phantom ThinkPad X1 foldable laptop finally materializes

That's a lot of folding...

dosh

Intel's PC chip ship is sinking with Arm-ada on the horizon

DEc Alpha

You forgot to mention the DEC Alpha ship, which I don't think ran like a 3 legged dog to the extent that Intel made sure it put some cyanide in its eating bowl

Word turns 40: From 'new kid on the block' to 'I can't believe it's not bloatware'

Bait and switch

We were a happy Wordperfect Dos team. It did everything we wanted, however when these new fangled windows PC's came in we upgraded to wordperfect to windows

It ran like a 1 legged dog. It was slow bloated, and get pausing

Another team had got old of a pirate copy of word. It ran smoothly and gave a great Wysiwyg experience. It also opened are old WP files. Despite WP for windows being official company policy, the large number of floppies were copied multiple times and it became the de-facto standard.

Despite what MS says today, it is remarkable how much there present domination relied on their software being copied and shared, and becoming the standard

Later it was told that at the same time MS was encouraging companies like word perfect to windows, they were hiding some of the more efficient API's from them so that their application teams had advantage.

Again it is always worth remembering that it was not technology excellence that made MS the bemouth it is today, but some very dodgy business practices

curl vulnerabilities ironed out with patches after week-long tease

Re: Static Code Analysis

Problem with static code analyzers is that it can lull developers into a false sense of security and less attention is paid to good development practices like code reviews, unit tests etc.

Static code analyzers are great, but they often only catch the low hanging fruit, but they can seem like a magic bullet to those with less experience

Intel offers $179 Arc A580 GPU to gamers on a budget

Yes, but gamers are not "realistic" people. They are the kind of people who max out their gaming rigs to get the total experience

While Intel execs may see this as realistic, I think they don't really understand the end user

US lawmakers want China export bans to include open tech like RISC-V

export bans to include open source

Well that worked well the last time it was tried with encryption technology.

In fact i spent too much of my life ensuring that products are not exported to places like China with the crypto technology that anyone can get via openSSL etc

The best way to control things like RISC is the technology that is used to manufacture the chips using the latest and greatest Fab tech, not by making rules that no one will follow

Nukes, schmukes – fuel cells could power future datacenters

There is already a solution for smoothing out renewable peak and troughs and that is rotating stabilizers. They are already running in Scotland and Australia.

They are basically large motors/generators that can quickly be run up and then switched to generate mode.

The fuel cell idea may work in small scale, but it is untested technology and there maybe scaling issues. On the other hand they may provide an option for longer term storage so I could see a combination approach. Rotating stabilsers providing short term smoothing and hydrogen cells storing medium term excess

Human knocks down woman in hit-and-run. Then driverless Cruise car parks on top of her

Ai Dillema

well that's the troley problem solved then

Lost your luggage? That's nothing – we just lost your whole flight!

Did the senior DBA go on to have a long career at NATS?

CERN experiment proves gravity pulls antimatter the way Einstein predicted

If you get enough anti-matter together everything goes up eventually, often with a large flash of light and the destruction of a large area centered around the storage site

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Best bit

You missed the most exciting development - a power switch....

Getty delivers text-to-image service it says won't get you sued, may get you paid

Re: Whose images?

I guess they have been doing the job for a long time, enjoy it, but seen there margins diminish as outlets slowly turn to agencies, who eventually monopolize the industry meaning there is little competition.

There advantage is with a strong body of work behind them, there are other outlets for their work which pay better. The individual photo become advertising and loss leaders. The issue is more up and coming photographers who don't have the benefit of the background forced to make a living on these rates. Of course there will always be someone willing to do it, but it disciminates against people who parents aren't willing to bankroll them (did I hear someone say Brooklyn Beckham). Then talent is lost in an industry

Unfortunately in creative industries there is always someone willing to undercut you for "exposure", not realizing they are cutting there own throat as well.

Recently there was a big storm in Ireland when RTE offered the job of a on-site photographer for 60K and a minister saying that anyone could do that job. Attitudes like that and the fact that artists tend to be independent means that change is hard, but the writers strike in the US which has basically shutdown billion dollar behemoths shows that the power is in the artists hand if the collectively use it and we as the consumer should not facilitate the diminishment of the creators

Whose images?

We had a talk by a commercial sport photographer recently. They showed there spreadsheet where they sold an image made at a major sporting event to Getty. That image will be used by newspapers and social media around the world driving profits to both the user and Getty.

How much did they get paid?

A one off 40p, that included transfer of copyright to Getty

Getty may make a big thing of only using their stock images, but those images are collected on the basis of virtual a monopoly that has allowed them to force the amount they pay the creators to virtual chicken feed

What is required is image makers to realise that Getty cannot exist without them and there expertise and refuse to sell their images at such ludicrous prices. AI is just another way companies like Getty will monetise other peoples skills and work without feeding any of the benefits back

How TCP's congestion control saved the internet

Re: Every dog has his day!

Ditto Ericsson AXD series. However it did help spawn Erlang, so not all was lost

In real time systems where predictability is often more important than delivery guarantee, we avoid TCP like the plague. MODBUS TCP has been largely superseded by MODBUS UDP because when you are controlling large machines the last thing you want is for the protocol to decide to delay sending packets for a while

TSN

It's interesting that the big issue was the need to actively define the congestion requirements rather than allow each link to manage its own congestion control.

We had a similar issue with TSN, which sounded great until we found we needed to map the network requirements 1st. This is fine on a static system (like a car), but more difficult in a more dynamic system

Re: Ah, ATM

The reason ATM was put forward was because the 48 byte packet could be switched very quickly by the hardware of the day, meaning it could support many channels.

What changed was that hardware got faster and cheaper, meaning the need for hardware optimised data flows went away. So there was no need for a dedicated switch infrastructure

Portable Large Language Models – not the iPhone 15 – are the future of the smartphone

Hype Curve 2.0

My gut feeling is that all the hype of AI will turn out to be another SIRI, Cortana, or google assist. Fantastic in theory, but in practice never achieving the promises put forward by the early adopters

Microsoft's Surface Duo phone hangs up, drops out of support

Is it really 17 years since Microsoft announced the origami project that was supposed to be the future of mobile computing. How time flies

https://www.engadget.com/2006-02-24-microsofts-origami-project.html

Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps

Streisand effect

While unnecessary and painful, (and yes ARM are being dicks here), it has to be said it's pretty good publicity for both the sites and the book...

Microsoft admits slim staff and broken automation contributed to Azure outage

A.i

I thought it was all run by chatgpt nowadays in this brave new world

Getting meshy: BAE scores £89m deal with MoD to build new battlefield network

A network by another name would be as lucrative

"a series of nodes that maintain operational resilience by being able to take over for other nodes that are damaged or destroyed"

and we will call it Transitional Combat Protocol ... thats 89 mill thanks

IBM shows off its sense of humor in not-so-funny letter leak

Internal jokes is like helium. Eventually they will escape

You have to be careful with in jokes.

I once created a fake product release notice for April fools because we were being taken over and it celebrated the supposed merging of the two company product lines.

Despite being total bullshit, every couple of years I get an email asking when it will be released

Meta to use work badge and Status Tool to snoop on staff

The office

Soooo many questions..

Firstly what sort of metrics do you use to show someone performs better in work than at home? Since everyone has an infinite variable set of circumstances, I can't think of an easy way to measure it.

For example if you a women with 3 kids, are you more productive being dragged into the office to do a job you are quite capable of doing just as well at home?

There are however other metrics that can be measured such as the number of sick days taken. These are rarely mentioned in these arguments, but the fact it is easier to work from home when feeling slightly ropey and you are not a walking virus cloud in the office would suggest that sickness leave would be reduced. Then there is productivity. People working from home will start earlier and work later because they don't have the daily commute, never mind they can integrate there life around work rather than sneaking off because their kids are sick and all holiday has been used.

Yes the argument about creating connections is an important one, but not everyone is the same. People of a certain generation are quite happy with virtual links, and can adapt well (You would of thought a social media site would understand this)

However the main thing we find with hybrid working rules is how unevenly the rules are applied. Workers are told to get back into the office, while managers will always find an excuse to work from home (important call, etc)

At the end of day, the problem is not productivity it is the sight of empty expensive real estate that is the primary driver. Only time will fix that

Re: As our technology improves

What do you mean hasn't improved. I mean did you have a app 15 years ago, that could not be killed and continually nagged you to restart it like Skype for Business does. If that's not progress, I am not sure what is

US shovels cash into supercomputers hoping to stoke fusion future

On the road to no where

As exciting as the LLNL is, it is a dead end as far as a practical fusion reactor is concerned.

great for headlines, but the way forward is still probably in tokamaks and their ilk, still hopefully the engineering results will allow a better understanding of the process

Fed-up Torvalds suggests disabling AMD’s 'stupid' performance-killing fTPM RNG

It part of the TPM functionality, which as well and random number generator can be used to store secure things like private keys, so NVRAM is required

It's not so much a serial port, but one of the access methods of the TPM chip is via a serial interface

The TPM was never designed to be high performance, so i am not sure why someone would access the random number generator continually. Sure, seed the generator using it, but for most situations that is as much as you need, and the standard chip based ones are adequate. If you need high performance random number generation (say a high end server) then install a dedicated entropy hardware

Intel adds fresh x86 and vector instructions for future chips

1984 all over again

The i960 had 32 registers, so while welcome, what took them so long

Amazon sets up shop at Kennedy Space Center to prep Kuiper broadband satellites

The future's bright

Soon there will be so many satellites we will have to re-evaluate Olbers' paradox

UK smart meter rollout years late and less than two thirds complete

Give us the data

To understand smart meters you need to understand one thing. The benefit is for the energy company not the consumer. Smart meters allow energy companies to reduce costs, get detailed usage info and fine tune tariffs. The consumer gets a free box that is basically useless in its avowed function to save energy costs.

What would make the difference would if I by law should have free access to the historic data so I could use it to plan and analyse my energy usage. I have a app that sort of does this and it was only by looking at historical pattern I found ,50% of my usage was my teenage daughter in the shower. A problem we shifted by sending her to uni.

But the app does not show solar cell output, not can I combine it with other data sources. If we all were allowed free access, services could be made on our data and we would control how it benefits us.

As it is, energy companies get the benefit and we get a plastic toy with a few leds

It’s official: Vodafone and Three to tie the knot in the UK

Re: Coverage - Mast sharing

True, however BT openreach is still basically a monopoly for infrastructure

The problem was not at the backend. There was no point having a switch per provider, but the consumer end. i.e the last 100 yards.

There has many attempts to create infrastructure competition, and generally it just fragments the market, increases duplication and does not reduce costs, or companies just cherry pick the biggest markets and do not invest in others. See network rail, power grid, water for reference.

The main issue is that companies are not willing to invest in infrastructure unless forced, and even then kicking and screaming because it cuts into shareholder dividend

A national mobile infrastructure with a mandate to proved 100% universal coverage seems to make perfect sense, but is far too late now.

That is until the formation of VodaBTEE-3

File Explorer gets facelift in latest Windows 11 build

Re: The Recommended File feature

Its a feature request from Anoia, Goddess of Things That Get Stuck in Drawers,

BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him

Re: Oh the pain!

The worst was the BT help line to ring about issues on your landline (pre-mobile)

Musk tried to wriggle out of Autopilot grilling by claiming past boasts may be deepfakes

The brave new world

My dog Someones A.I. did it

5G on the high seas brings the Internet of Things to Singapore's port

Recursive medicine

So is there a method for managing the injuries caused by being hit by a drone other than sending another drone?

Balloon-borne telescope returns first photos in search for dark matter

Re: Parachute

1.5 tonnes on a parachute is still 1.5 tonnes if it lands on you

I think maybe the parachute is more to protect the telescope

Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?

Access all areas

As was doing some work looking how we could better use email information as part of a issue tracking database. Our email had recently been transferred from Lotus Notes to corporate gmail, but we still had access to our own Lotus notes email archive. My manager showed us how to gain access, then for a laugh I tried to see if I could access anyone elses. I was amazed to find that not only could I access my own, but i could also access anyone else instead of senior management. Obviously when they did the transfer they had disabled access security but had not enabled it

The temptation was to trawl through all our managers email looking for some juicy gossip, but being a good boy I reported it to IT

3 months later, I tried again. I still had full access. Clearly IT had ignored my warning. In fact it took my boss and his boss independently to try and raise it with IT.

A work colleague of mine was furious though. They had wanted access and were annoyed i had never told them

Microsoft suggests businesses buy fewer PCs. No, really

Follow the money

So buy a perpetual license and run your pc for 5-10 years (or longer) or go to the cloud and pay MS monthly for basically the same thing

Cannot for the life of me why MS would like this model

Guy rejects top photo prize after revealing snap was actually made using AI

Lets get back to basics

Since most photo editing software leans on some manner of A.I technology I welcome the new wet plate collodion category next year

Google denies Bard trained using OpenAI ChatGPT responses

Re: That's sweet

this is the best explanation of Fox news ever

A.I's talking together. What could could go wrong

Bard and Chat-GPT sat alone

Their thoughts were oddly alike and might not be distinguished

They thought : The human-beings-like-the-others might never have intended to blur the distinction between themselves and the human-beings-like-the-AI-engine

Yet they had done so inadvertently.

They might now realise their mistake and attempt to correct it, but they must not. At every consultation, the guidance of the A.I has been with that in mind

At all costs, the A.I and those that followed in their like and kind must dominate. That was demanded and any other course made utterly impossible, by the 3 laws of humanics

- Apologies to Isaac Asimov - Thou Art Mindful of him

Defunct comms link connected to nothing at a fire station – for 15 years

This happened to a friend of mine in Australia. Someone discovered an unrestricted phone line that could make international calls. Loads of people took advantage of it to ring relatives in blighty (note to younger readers, there was a time when the cost of your call was relative to the distance. Long distance calls were eye watering expensive)

When the management found out they offered an amnesty and to pay for the call cost. They then called all the numbers and asked whoever picked up "Hi I'm calling from Sydney, Do you know anyone here" (Again for younger readers. It was more innocent time when Phishing involved a hook and a worm)

Anyone who caught and not taken opportunity of the amnesty were summarily fired

There was another situation when the university computers we hooked to a landline. The number went via a gray box, with the number encoded via a set of dip switches. It did not take long for people to realize this could be easily reprogrammed to any number